All-Star Panel, Live From TAtech in Chicago

When you put Chad & Cheese in front of a Corp Recruitment Marketing Specialist, the head of an iconic Recruitment Ad Agency, a Video Goddess and an old crusty coder, turned CTO turned CEO turned Recruitment Marketing Evangelist....

THIS is what you get...

Brought to you by the brave and iron constitutions of JobAdX, Sovren and Canvas - if anyone deserves your time and money it's those guys ^^^.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:Disability Solutions is your sourcing and recruiting partner for people with disabilities.

Chad: It's time for a little chat. And she's fun in Chicago at TAtech for their Recruitment, Marketing, Leadership Summit. Check it out.

Announcer: Hide your kids, lock the doors, you're listening to HR's Most Dangerous Podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, flash opinion, and loads of snark. Bubble up, boys and girls. It's time for The Chad and Cheese Podcast.

JZ: I can't promise that this will be PG, like the rest of the content.

Joel: Or beneficial.

Chad: I can promise it won't be.

JZ: Or beneficial.

Joel: Well worth your time.

JZ: Yeah, I will let Chad and Cheese introduce themselves and their panelists. But these two guys, I think honestly, and I don't say this because I'm wearing their tee shirt, but are two of the more genuine, knowledgeable people in this space. I spent a lot of time with analysts and influencers and people in the space, that I just have conversations with, and these two have a really unique ability to understand the space and be objective about it and then add some real value when they're not getting hammered on stage.

JZ: I'll pass it to you guys. We've got a great panel here. And

yeah, let's get to happy hour.

Joel: Thanks JZ.

Chad: Boom.

Joel: Welcome to the final presentation.

Chad: Final countdown (Europe style - It's the final countdown).

Joel: Can we get the full screen for God's sakes? I mean, we're very particular about our branding and we only have one slide so there won't be any mistakes later.

Joel: You all know us. Chad and Cheese. I am Joel Cheesman.

Chad: I'm Chad Sowash.

Joel: And we're The Chad and Cheese Podcast: HR's Most Dangerous. Well let's get to the conversation because we only have 30 minutes. So we're going to give you guys about 140 characters to introduce yourself until we get to the Q&A. So Jason, go.

Jason Jones: Hi, I'm Jason Jones. I'm the Recruitment Marketing Specialist at Draft Kings.

Joe Shaker: Hi everyone. I'm Joe Shaker, Junior President of Shaker Recruitment Marketing and proud father of Lillian, Maryanne, and Joseph.

Joel: How many wins do the Cubs have right now?

Joe Shaker: We're not going there.

Joel: Okay. And by the way, just real fast, if you're going to go there. I've never heard someone introduce you to is genuine. So that's first. That's a first.

Abby Cheesman: I'm Abby Cheesman, co-founder at Skill Scout. Not Joel's wife.

Joel: No relation.

Abby Cheesman: We make recruitment videos that are awesome.

Thom Kenney: Thom Kenny, CEO of Smashfly and former victim of The Chad and Cheese Podcast.

Joel: And live to tell a tale. So I'm going to start with you Thom.

Thom Kenney: Great.

Joel: Your presentation, you poo pooed on VR. Isn't it a little too early to like bury virtual reality?

Thom Kenney: It's not burying virtual reality. It's knowing when it's going to be ready to use. It's like a lot of technologies. You can be far ahead of the technology field. It just may not have a good application that you can use in the real world.

Joel: Because I heard you buried it, but maybe we'll roll back the tape later.

Thom Kenney: Yeah, but it's like a dog, you carry it and use it later.

Joel: Anyway, Abby, your video first and lake video was hot on this. I don't want to stick on VR because no one cares about it.

Chad: No, they don't. It's second life. Nobody gives a shit.

Joel: Let's start with the video because apparently 84% of all Internet traffic by 2020 is going to be video related. I assume you agree with that.

Abby Cheesman: I agree.

Joel: What are some of your opinions on best practices and what [crosstalk 00:03:10] should be doing with video?

Abby Cheesman: I think if you haven't done any videos, kind of the baby step

into showing off what your workplace is all about is a realistic job preview. So just a little fun factoid. We launched a video actually in partnership with Joe and Shaker, one of our mutual clients.

Joel: Chi Town.

Abby Cheesman: For a tower climber position. And so this is a job that is just hard to fathom if you can't see it, right? These are the guys that are climbing 800 feet in the air, test service and build cell phone towers. And so we launched a two minute video with our client and they had 44,000 views within the first week. And so if that doesn't tell you something about the network effect this is on Facebook.

Joel: What platforms got them that number? Was it advertised? How did they get there?

Abby Cheesman: Facebook.

Joel: Facebook?

Abby Cheesman: Yeah. And I don't know what happened behind the scenes in terms of other media buys, but this was organic on Facebook if this particular launch.

Chad: No buy on Facebook. That was all organic?

Abby Cheesman: The first launch was all organic.

Chad: Holy shit. Holy shit

Joel: That's awesome. That's awesome.

Joel: So Joe, you do nice, pretty videos, historically at least. Where do you guys fit or anyone in between the really nice HD professionally made videos and more like what Cheesman over here is making with sort of we're on the scene, we're doing this guerrilla style. Where do you guys fit on that spectrum?

Joe Shaker: I think even heard it right, Joel? Bias, but Tony La Porte did a fabulous job today. It's being authentic. And so I think we're moving away from the polished videos and you're moving more right with Abby's doing on the authentic videos. Obviously what we saw today too with All True, I mean even almost using your own ambassadors, video content being real and being truthful versus being the professionally produced videos. So we're seeing the shift more towards that versus the polished. Also, let's look at what we were talking about. Many people talking in our space today: time is of the essence. I forgot who it was that talked about just the timing to produce videos. We don't have six months, right? These organizations need people tomorrow. And so it's not only is it the content that the individuals are looking for, but it's

also recruiting. We have to go now and so we don't have time to wait.

Chad: Jason, let's flip it up a little bit for you. You're in the recruitment marketing side. What's your title again?

Jason Jones: Recruitment Marketing Specialists.

Chad: Okay. So do you report to HR/TA or marketing?

Jason Jones: I report to the VP of ta, VP of TA.

Chad: VP of TA. So what's your connection to marketing? Do you have any, do you embed with them at all? I mean, how does that work?

Jason Jones: So with recruitment marketing, in my experience it's been a gray area. When you kind of joined the company and you're the new person, you have to done to draw that line in the sand? So who owns what? When it comes to social media, is your social media team going to post your content? Are you going to post it? For PR posts, are you going to write the culture piece write-ups or are they going to write-up? So send that line in the sand.

Jason Jones: I was fortunate where my boss kind of drew that line for me. So when I came in I didn't have to, but in my previous company it was a constant struggle. It was a constant back and forth. Who owns what, us, you, us, you. And so, it's a

matter of just kind of drawn the line.

Joel: Do you think of yourself as a marketer?

Jason Jones: Now? Yes, but my previous life as a recruiter, so I can kind of go between both worlds.

Chad: So how often do you actually work with marketing to setup content?

Jason Jones: Setup content? Not every day. It depends. It depends.

Chad: Because marketing has big budget, right? They've got the big budget, they've got all the brainstorming and all that other happy horseshit, right? So I mean, doesn't it make a lot of sense to be able to really suck all of that out of there? Especially on the budget side, right?

Jason Jones: More so for the tools. Marketing won't share their budget from a content creation because their content generate sales, mine is going to candidates.

Chad: But they're not candidates, their customers. The people that are applying to your jobs. I bet a good amount of them are actually customers. So couldn't you have a business case to say, "Hey look, we need some cash over here, guys"?

Jason Jones: So it's funny you say that. Draft Kings yes, our players at Draft Kings want to work for us and so we get a lot of inbound traffic from them cause they were hardcore rabid fans. My previous company, not so much because we were a product company, we had different products for different verticals and so it was a little different. What I do is I partner with their tool. So our social media team, they use Spredfast for their tools. How can I get a Spredfast license so I can start sharing my content within your platform?

Jason Jones: Our web development team, they use CMS Tool. I can't remember the name of it, but it really allowed us to manage the backend of the website. Can you teach me how to use that site so I can update our career page using your tool? So they won't share their budget, but I can partner on their tools and saves money for me trying to purchase a competing tool.

Joel: Joe, is internal marketing getting involved with recruitment a good thing for you? Or do you find that as sort of a threat because ... Historically companies have gone to you for the marketing. If they go internally, is that bad for you?

Joe Shaker: No. You want marketing? Have a seat at the table. So many times I think, and it's if you look over just the industry in general, you talk about recruiting, you talk about budget, but in reality there really isn't a budget. And I will say too many of our friends in this room, obviously media majority in this room, so many times you keep will come and say, "Well, what's the price?" As organizations, if you can prove value and then you can fill those recs, they're not going to care what the price is. If you go back over time, and obviously we're blessed our business has been around for over six decades. We remember the days when you used to run $30,000 print ads, right? And they ran weekly-

Joel: The good ol' days.

Joe Shaker: And they were the good old days.

Chad: Right next door.

Joe Shaker: But the point is, the budget in talent acquisition is there, whether it be sits in HR or in marketing, just show that you have value, show that you can fill those jobs with quality applicants, they'll spend the money.

Chad: Is marketing at the table at all though with your clients?

Joe Shaker: Yes. For sure, for sure. More and more.

Joel: It's commercial time.

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Chad: It's show time.

Chad: So what about on the video side? I mean video is, and again it doesn't have to be polished.

Joel: I'm sure marketing wants a piece of the video process, right?

Abby Cheesman: Yeah. I think collaboration is the name of the game. I mean if you don't engage your marketing partners as you're releasing videos of your company, that's a mistake. It should be collaborative. I think more and more companies are thinking about, just like you were talking about Chad, these are your candidates and your customers. This is the same pool of people. And as you think about especially cult brands, that there's a bigger following than just, I want to apply for a job or I want to buy a thing. It's presence. And I think collaboration is how we're going to see more and more of that happen.

Joel: Are you finding much of marketing saying like, "Well, I mean this is just an iPhone with a ... We can do this. Like let us do it." Are you finding that? Is marketing saying, "We don't want any part of this. We got to deal with getting customers and driving the revenue." What are you saying in return?

Abby Cheesman: So in our experience, a lot of our clients have video teams on their marketing team and they don't have the time or priority to do TA videos. And so that's when we come in. But I think there's always going to be a space for a nuanced message for people who are looking for a position versus looking for a product or service. But it's collaborative and I think TA is prioritizing video and moving at a faster clip sometimes than marketing can move their resources, and so that's where we see a lot of our work.

Chad: So Thom, new question. Earlier you said that one of your clients actually put in pretty much end to end automation and it sucked for the candidate. We've seen surveys, I mean, Sherman, the elitist group has actually done surveys showing that like 66, 70% plus of candidates, they don't care. They'd rather connect with a chat bot because they're sick and tired of going into that black hole. So where do you find that balance? I mean, because yeah, there needs to be a quote unquote human piece to it, but can't the engagement in itself, whether it's a chat bot or an email or what have you, can't that be more human when we're talking about actually having marketing 101 subject lines, right? That kind of thing. It seems like it's more like adoption. They're falling down, putting the automation in place and then just walking away. What's up with the adoption piece?

Thom Kenney: So you probably miss part of the presentation. That was really the important part, which was chat bots and the way chat bots are interfacing. It's not about having a chat bot. Yes, they want to interface with that a little bit better, but the reality is how are they interfacing with it? Right. In thinking about it from this perspective, we're seeing a trend in the auto industry where Tesla is selling cars and you can buy a Tesla and you can have it delivered to your house and you have three days to drive it and if you don't like it, you can just return it. So it's happening completely outside of a human interaction.

Thom Kenney: And I actually used this example a few times when I talk about chat bots and why they can be impactful. If you think about going to buy a used car, who wants to go to a used car dealership? Nobody wants to go to a used car dealership. You don't want to deal with the sales guy, you don't want to deal with the finance guy. Yeah, you want to see the car, you want to look at it. But the reality is you loathe going to a used car shop. If you think about it from a lot of the passive candidates that are out there today, do they want to talk to a recruiter before they find anything out?

Thom Kenney: The reality is not necessarily they don't want to be sold about a job or sold about a company. They just want to find out a little bit more about what's going on. So we actually use something in our advertising that talks about how often people that interface with some of the chat bots that we use with our customers. How often these people say thank you, or something like, thank you? Because the chat bot is creating an emotive response where there's a humanistic component to how you're interfacing with that bot, right?

Thom Kenney: If you think about-

Chad: They're not just anybody interacting with them, that's the fucking problem. Right?

Thom Kenney: No. but it doesn't matter if it's an actual human, it matters if they feel there's a connection.

Chad: That's what I'm saying. They're used to the black hole and now they're not getting the black hole. And now they're saying thank you.

Thom Kenney: Thank you. Exactly. Exactly. So when you try to automate it from start to finish, and it's all a purely transactional thing from beginning to end, that's where you miss the human component. But even if there's a perceived human component in the chat bot, you're going to create that emotive response with the candidate. And that's really what you want. You want the candidate to feel something through this process. And if they feel something through this process, whether they see a great video, whether they get their answers done quickly or whether they understand admission or you've got onsite childcare. I mean there's lots of reasons to get excited [crosstalk 00:14:29].

Joel: Another thing is the cure to ghosting is to have people come in for three days to work and if they stick around then they're hired.

Thom Kenney: Well that's the Zappos thing, right? You stick around for a few weeks and if you don't want to stay off you go. You just get-

Joel: Joe had a comment I think.

Joe Shaker: The comment I was going to make was too Thom, and I think you hit it perfectly on the point was you're allowing to giving the organizations' candidates options. Whereas before, Chad, what you were saying, it was a one way dialogue, right? And everyone was forced into a dark hole because there was no other options. Now there are options, but I think some organizations, sometimes they're going too fast and I think Ryan Crystal, and I did just say this, Ryan Crystal made a good point-

Joel: Holy shit.

Chad: What?

Joe Shaker: ... you can't go all in and just buy the shiny new toy, right? You have to obviously think it out, put it through the right process and then let the kid decide how they want to interact with you.

Joel: Can we talk about ghosting for a second and particularly Jason is on the corporate side. Is ghosting a big problem with you and what do you, and if it is, what are you guys doing to remedy the problem?

Jason Jones: I think ghosting is a big problem for everyone. Back in the day, you could post your job or you could reach out to the candidate, they would respond, you can schedule a phone screen. Now you really have to understand what that intrinsic need is to broadcast your EVP and get them coming back for every stitch of recruitment process they need to come back. And how can you broadcast your EVP so they do come back? Before it was, you have the power. Now the cans have the power and so we're constantly at Draft Kings broadcasting our EVP to every candidate that we speak to over and over and over again and give him a reason to come back. Even for a phone interview. Even for a HackerRank test, give them a reason to come back every time.

Chad: How are you doing that though? Are you doing [crosstalk 00:16:18]. Let's say for instance, from an interview standpoint that ghosting on the interview or not the first day or what have you, how are you keeping them? I mean, broadcasting that content. How specifically are you-

Joel: Do you give them Draft Kings credits every time they come in?

Jason Jones: Actually yes, actually yes. Do you work there? How do you

know?

Joel: No. I just got good ideas.

Chad: No, no. He uses it. That's he knows.

Jason Jones: So in my own experience when I was being courted by Draft Kings my interview process, they said, "Hey, before you come in here some credits, use a platform." You don't have to mess up your sports fan to work at Draft Kings. But playing the product, get used to it and come back with recommendations, if you don't like it, tell us, if you like things perfect. But, if you're free trialing your products, especially to a technologist, because we hire a lot of data engineers, having played the tool before coming in, don't have everything be so black hole where the first time they're seeing the product or really talking someone's, when they're coming in the door, give a free trial if you can.

Joel: I love it. I love it.

Chad: Well of course you would.

Joel: Yeah, I'm a Fan Duel guy. But you guys are owned by the same company.

Jason Jones: Please don't say that.

Joel: Oh, sorry. What do we miss? I thought retargeting we missed.

Jason Jones: Yeah, I'll agree. Retargeting was missed. But it's also, you can say that, how does it fit into the strategy? Most of the today was around let's talk about employment branding. Let's get the brand message created. How does the message go out? Is again, and it's twice now as Ryan said it's part of all campaigns. I would use caution though on retargeting that our industry a little bit different I believe in the consumer. It also goes back to tracking, which came up multiple times today. And I would be careful on retargeting someone potentially that has been dispositioned out. Or retargeting a candidate that hasn't heard from us in five 10, 15 days.

Joel: How far out should you continue to market to someone after they've been to the career site in your opinion? Two weeks, 30 days?

Jason Jones: How fast is the recruiter is going to guarantee they're going to get a response? If I would put the recruiters, SLAs are going to respond to all cans within 48 hours, then I would wait 48 hours and then retarget the people that they haven't heard from. But sending messages to people that are still waiting to hear from recruiters or sending messages to people that have already been said no to with our lovely message that all comes out of the ATS that says thanks, but no thanks is not only a waste of dollars, but what they're going to do? They're going to go to Glassdoor and possibly write some negative reviews. So you gotta be careful in retargeting in our space. A little bit different than in consumer.

Joel: Go ahead.

Thom Kenney: You know what else we didn't talk about? We didn't talk about a trend that's starting to come out, which is no interviews. You got to see the process, you submit something, you don't talk to anybody and you're offered a job. So when we think about how our entire evolution is-

Chad: High volume mostly?

Thom Kenney: Not even high volume. I mean the thing about it, there are plenty of ways and it goes back a little bit to, take a job in three days and we'll see if you do well or not, especially in the gig economy. And you're thinking about software engineers. It's a very clear articulation of what your skill set is. You either know Ruby or you don't, you either know Python or you don't. So why bother with going through all this crap that we do about whether or not my gut tells me your good hire? Why don't we just create an entirely scientific process about it?

Thom Kenney: Now it goes against this idea of the human component, that Senate. But if you shrink the hiring time, is that an advantage point? If you can go from Monday, you apply for a job, you do a couple of things online, Monday night you have an offer and Tuesday morning you start. I mean that that is a game changer for a lot of companies. And if they churn through a bunch of folks, they churn through a bunch of folks because they're not really spending their opportunity costs to hire everybody. Just churn though them.

Joel: So gig economy, I mean, I think Upwork is trying to build that world where you just take it off the shelf and they use it when you're done, you're done. How is the Gig economy and those platforms affecting everyone sort of on the panel from the employer to the marker?

Abby Cheesman: So I'll do sort of an answer to that question. So that's how we hire, when I'm hiring videographers, we don't go through a lengthy interview process. I ask for your portfolio and I give you an assignment, which is film a video of yourself, introduce yourself and edit it with this slate. And they submit a work sample and then maybe we talked to them briefly, but we bring them along to shadow a shoe and it's very quick and it's rapid and you rapidly find out who you can work with and the creative process, and it's worked really well for us and we're heavily reliant on a gig economy.

Chad: How many of your clients are doing that, Joe?

Joe Shaker: Which portion?

Chad: The portion of just the no interview. Just show me your stuff and-

Joel: Upwork puts the marketing

Joe Shaker: For you. I would add to that question, not the portion of the gig economy, but what about no ATS? When more of my clients are moving to, let's go to the quicker process. Still doing the interview, but getting up, going around the ATS. Why are people running to Indeed and doing hosted jobs? Is it because they like host of jobs? No, the recruiters are going around the ATS. They don't want to use the ATS. They'd rather just use the CRM. That makes I believe more sense. It makes sense from the candidates process and get them interested and then push them into the ATS. See that more than the gig.

Chad: Jason, how many interviews do you have to go through at Draft Kings?

Jason Jones: It's pretty lengthy. Probably about five. That's more on the technical side and that's including hacker rank and it's a very, very hard technical assessment. We want the best of the best only because we're thinking of technical problems that haven't happened yet. So if you have, Mitsubishi who scores you five touchdowns, we can't have our platform crashing. We need top of the line technologists. Aspirational, aspirational.

Joel: Did he throw six in one game? I'm pretty sure he did.

Jason Jones: We need people who can think outside the box and I don't think we can ever get to a point where we have no interview-

Chad: In a tight labor market though. Aren't you losing good candidates? I mean you have to be.

Jason Jones: We're fortunate where we're not right now.

Chad: Really?

Jason Jones: Only because of the insurer and [crosstalk 00:22:24] and you get free bedding credits.

Chad: Ah, good call.

Joel: It's commercial time.

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Chad: It's showtime.

Joel: Great. So you're not leveraging a platforms like Upwork to bring in contract workers for jobs?

Jason Jones: No.

Joel: Do you see a day where you would or you'd be open to that or no?

Jason Jones: We do, I guess more so on the customer associates side. So if you're per player who has a complaint, we'll bring in those kinds of temp workers and then we'll convert them if it works out in some of those temp work is actually moving to the business and to marketing our product, but more for full-time, it's kind of full-time or not.

Joel: Yeah. I want to talk Google for Jobs. Is it a don't believe the hype situation or do you think it's a legitimate threat to everybody else in the ecosystem?

Jason Jones: It's a legitimate threat. I mean when you type in ... Everyone uses Google. Right? I don't think many people are using Yahoo or Duckduckgo or the other niche sites. Everyone goes to Google. You hear it all the time. You hear it in movies and TV shows, it's a household name.

Joel: Are you actively looking at your jobs on Google for Jobs and how they're ranking and who else is in there in terms of how they can apply? Are you pretty active with how you're doing there and what sort of feedback or would you give us at this point?

Jason Jones: Yeah, so I would probably say ... So our agency who's here, Bayer. Thank you. They do a good job with our SEO and constantly making sure ...

product placement.

Joel: ABC. ABC.

Chad: Always be closing baby.

Jason Jones: They do a good job making sure that our jobs are constantly ranked the highest, especially on the technical side. No one knows Draft Kings as a technology company. So we're always have to a repositioning, retargeting, make sure our jobs are ranked the highest shown on Google.

Joel: Joe, what are you see on Google for Jobs?

Chad: What are you doing for your clients to be able to focus on that ranking?

Joe Shaker: Something I'm doing, obviously it's bringing awareness to Google into the space. Now at Shaker we've been doing search engine marketing since it started. So for so long and our space though many people in HR and TA are like, "Well what is a search engine marketing I don't want it." The rise of Google for Jobs increase the awareness for Google. And most organizations said, "I don't want my job sponsored" And obviously we all know you can't sponsor your jobs in Google for Jobs. So it has propelled the industry and got organizations to understand the importance of you need to have an SEM campaign running in addition to obviously your programmatic job distribution and so forth. So it has from a Google perspective, I don't know if it's competitive to your point earlier, but it has increased, the buying of SEM.

Joel: Do you have any data around it, what it's meant for traffic, inbound versus maybe other sources that have lost as a result to Google for Jobs?

Joe Shaker: If they're not adding budget of course, where is it coming from? It's coming from job distribution. Most organizations right now are adding, right? Especially in the market that we see he market that they're in, how hard it is. So they're not cutting from budget, they're adding in. There's justification for it.

Joel: Are any companies strategically posting jobs anymore or is it all programmatic at this point?

Joe Shaker: Oh. No, they're doing both. And I would say the latter. Programmatic is growing the fastest, but they're still doing traditional.

Chad: How much duration versus actual performance?

Joe Shaker: Every organization's different and the industry is different. But I mean the ones that are still buying postings are doing the duration base less than paper performance, less than programmatic side. I'd go paper performance, duration, programmatic.

Chad: Okay. Abby, when it comes to, I don't know if it's YouTube or what, what's really the main methodology? You were talking about Facebook earlier, that you're seeing that clients are getting amazing amounts of traction. Where's the traction at? Social-

Joel: Where should videos be in, and where's the waste of time? Tick tock?

Abby Cheesman: I don't know, Joel. When you engage employees and creating content, which video naturally does, and then you encourage them to share it with their friends, people are really proud to show off when they're featured and when they're selected to be in an employee video. So I think traditional social, Facebook is big. I think Instagram is growing. I think we've been asked to do a lot more short format. I'm really interested in playing an Instagram story type format. I think that's a growing, I mean I'm a huge consumer of Instagram stories.

Joel: Have you done that yet?

Abby Cheesman: We've done a couple. Then I think, Snapchat is kind of dead. We did some geo targeting and some video campaigns there, but we haven't really seen a lot of uptake. But I think Facebook still runs strong. And I think in terms of social share and getting employees to engage and amplify your employee engagement, and referral program, that's where we're seeing a lot.

Joel: Are you doing much SEO around YouTube videos to rank within Google search results? So like when I search working at company name, do those videos show up well or are you seeing any of that?

Abby Cheesman: Depends on how well the company is optimizing. So we sort of

drop off when the content is made and give some best practices. But then we introduced them to Joe and people who know what they're doing in programmatic and buying. I think one thing that's not going away is that as Google becomes bigger, they're going to continue to give preference to posts with video in their algorithm. But when it comes to what happens next, I mean, that's outside of our realm.

Chad: So Thom, you've got this great experience. It's wonderful. You've pretty much surpassed the customer/candidates expectations and then they hit the apply button and they have to go into the applicant tracking system. What are you doing to be able to help clients get past that and understand that, you're gathering data, they need some data, but yet it seems so repetitive and duplicative and in many cases, and the process just sucks. What are you guys doing to be able to help HR and TA better understand that UX means everything?

Thom Kenney: It's a struggle. It's a clear struggle. And part of it is because you have a lot of TA organizations that love the front end experience they have. They love the career site, all the interactive media that they have, the nurturing and the engagement. And then they try to have this conversation and say, "HR folks, we can't take 45 minutes for somebody to fill out a job application. We just can't." And HR just crosses their arms and says, "Well, compliance, well legal, well insert your explanation here."

Thom Kenney: And it's incredibly frustrating because there is another large company in our space who tried to force everyone to move their talent network forms to after the apply process. That's a fundamentally stupid thing to do because-

Chad: Was that Indeed? Did I hear Indeed?

Thom Kenney: I didn't mention the company name. So it's a fundamentally stupid decision because you're losing all that opportunity to nurture and engage. And I remember our conversation I had where I was told, "Well just tell your customers to change their apply process." It's literally throwing your arms up in the air saying, "Enterprise customers don't work that way. They don't think that way." And in many enterprise customers there's a separation of church and state between TA and HR. It's just the way it is. And that's the nature of where we are today.

Thom Kenney: But you think about the apply overlay sort of concept. You think about what Rethink Data is doing for example, with trying to encourage better applications, with better process flows. I remember going through one of our customers application process and I remember I gave up about half an hour into it when they asked me to hold my driver's license up to my webcam so they can take a picture of my driver's license and I was like, "I'm done with you. I don't even know if I want the job from you. Well no, actually I do know now than I don't want the job from you."

Thom Kenney: It's going to be a real struggle over the next say, year, two years, three years to get folks to really understand that that whole part of it, you do all this great work on the nurturing and engagement side, all this great level of influence that you're generating. If you get people excited about opportunities and they go to that black hole, they go to that ATS and it's not necessarily the ATS' is fault. The implement implementation of a phenomenal technology can still be shit because it's how you do it that really makes a difference.

Thom Kenney: but it's going to take a real sea change in the industry to understand that the apply process starts the moment you discover the candidate, not at the moment that they say they click that apply button. It starts way before that and that entire experience, even beyond getting the job, it's the onboarding. It's the how you interface with the LMS. It's three years being an employee. That engagement process needs to continue all the way from discovery to my new favorite word, worktirement, right? It's got to go all the way through that.

Joel: I still want to know what that means. I'm going to find out by the end of the day.

Chad: he wants to because he wants to be in worktirement.

Thom Kenney: I really want to be in worktirement right now.

Joel: We've heard a little bit today around voice search and voice interaction.

Chad: I love it.

Joel: Obviously Alexa, Siri, et cetera.

Chad: My favorite. Yeah.

Joel: It certainly hasn't made any sort of progress in the employment space. Will it? How long is that timetable? What does it look like? Any opinions on voice? Does it kill chat bots when you could talk actually talk.

Thom Kenney: It doesn't kill bots. It augments chat bots.

Chad: Exactly. That's the processes here.

Thom Kenney: The challenge with that isn't about whether or not voice technology has an application. It absolutely does. It's about whether or not that voice technology can actually understand you. Right? Because let's say Joel, it's early morning, you're really sick of Chad over here. You're like, "I really hate doing this company thing. I got to go find a job."

Joel: This morning basically.

Thom Kenney: This morning, basically.

Chad: Just like every morning.

Thom Kenney: and you wake up and you're like, "Alexa, tell me what kinds of jobs are on Google." And Alexa comes back and says, "I'm sorry. There are no jobs where you can Google." Right. Natural language processing is not quite there yet to really get it to a point that you can very easily interface with voice commands. There's going to be some development time of technology to get to that point where really is impactful for our industry.

Joe Shaker: I would just say, think about what the candidate is going to be in and that the users are going to be doing. And I look at my children and I think a couple other people were saying that earlier and talking about what their kids were surfing on the Internet and what they're looking at YouTube. And I look at my five year old and she yells at Alexa and says, "Play Disney music." Right? And so what's to stop her from 15, 10 years from now say, "Find me a job." Now hopefully her job will be Shaker Recruitment Marketing.

Chad: Jobs near me.

Joe Shaker: But I mean that's what they're being trained and we're training them to do that. So one would say, I would agree though, obviously time the technology's not there yet, but it's going to catch up. And the younger audiences, that's how they're doing it. They're not going to pull out their phone and start typing.

Joel: Jason, I'm curious on working with marketing, do you guys ever have discussions about, hey, in our consumer marketing, can we bleed a little bit of our, hey, interested in a job we're hiring as well? Or does that conversation not ever happen?

Jason Jones: So for Draft Kings, no it doesn't actually. Our corporate colors are black, orange, green, that may not resonate with our candidates. And so when I talk with our design team, which is kind of a shared resource, I say, how can we soften the colors? Designs that get a for a certain consumer of a certain demographics. Our candidates are not that, they're more. And so, I need you to adapt to my needs, actually.

Joel: It's commercial time.

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Chad: It's show time.

Chad: So here's a question for all of you. Is an employment brand just really the symptom of a shitty overall brand? We see big cult brands who have a brand and they focus on that one brand, right? And that's what it is all the way through. They focus on, not just the ... obviously a mission statement, but it's more purpose-driven, right? We talked to the global head of community at Airbnb, and we're talking about colors? He didn't care about colors. It's kind of like the Pete Buttigeig thing, right? Where they put out the design kit and go do whatever you want with it. It was all about purpose. It all focused on purpose. And then when we asked him, "what about your employment brand?" I mean, he almost had a seizure. He's like, "there's no employment brand." So do we think that employment brands really a symptom of the overall brand just really sucking and not focusing on employment?

Jason Jones: For us, our industry is daily fantasy, sports, sports betting and media. Sports betting goes against people's moral fiber. And so, in a way, we need our employer brand to attract the right people. We need our employer brand to say we're working on cool technology that's interesting. Our consumer brand is not going to do that. It's going to say, come play daily fantasy, come back, come in and come consume some video content that we're producing.

Joel: Because without employer brand, people might think they're walking into a sports book in Vegas when they walk into the Draft Kings.

Chad: Well, yeah. They're focused on revenues at that point. Not purpose.

Joel: But what he's saying is they have to overcome-

Chad: I know what he's saying, it was in English. So yeah, I totally get it. So Joe, your thoughts?

Joe Shaker: Sure. The employment brand is the visualization of the employment value proposition. Value proposition is obviously taking in consideration the company brand plus what it's like to work at the organization. And then again as Tony said, how do you differentiate yourself from some of the competition? I mean I would say is the employment brand by itself? No, it resonates well and it has to go and lie in line with the consumer brand, but does have a life of its own.

Abby Cheesman: I think it's about the stories you allow yourself to tell, also. I think a consumer brand has a specific voice and employer brand allows you to tell from an employee's perspective. Aside from those companies that have achieved that cult level, most companies are not quite there yet. And so I think employer brand actually helps elevate to a closer thing to that cult brand.

Chad: I think storytelling though, is as a big piece of it though, being able to really demonstrate purpose and help them understand that if you do have a moral problem with gambling, well you probably shouldn't fucking work here, right?

Abby Cheesman: Right?

Chad: Yeah.

Abby Cheesman: Well, and I think your employer brand is authentic when it's told by your employees. Right? I don't think there's anything disingenuous about creating an employer brand to help cultivate and allow people to tell those stories. But if you're doing it right, it's a reflection of what's actually the experience of working there. Right?

Chad: Thom? Anything?

Thom Kenney: Yeah. One of the stats that we have talks about how you have a bad experience going through an interview process or an engagement process, it's going to negatively affect your impression of the brand, which is a product brand. I don't think that enough companies, especially at the enterprise level, really realize that your brand permeates everything you do from an employment brand perspective. It doesn't matter. You can be a horrible, horrible company just based on perception in the market. It doesn't matter how good your employment branding is. If your employment branding is crap, it's going to negatively impact your product brand. I mean, think about just the story that I talked about with CVS, people know CVS is a pharmacy, but they don't know that CVS can transform healthcare just with all the data they're sitting on.

Thom Kenney: And even a small company like us, you do a nurturing campaign, it's like we've got these great opportunities, great things we can do. The first thing that happens is like, "Smashfly? What? Who the hell thought of that name? What the hell is Smashfly? Bug company? Is this like a pest control?" So even for us, just even the name of the company has a trickle down effect to the employment brand. And it's not just gambling. I remember one day somebody sent me saying, this was like 10 years ago, this great company, this great opportunity, huge senior level technology position. And they didn't tell me the name of the company, like through the first half hour of the discussion. And finally I said, "Well, who actually are you?" And it was a cigarette company in Kentucky.

Thom Kenney: I was like, no, because that doesn't match with my value proposition. Right? So the brand itself has so much of an impact. And this is why when we were talking about earlier about the correlation between what TA is doing and to an extent what recruitment marketing is doing and aligning with the marketing team, that has got to become a symbiotic relationship. It has got to get closer together and the technologies that we're going to see and the next three, four, five years, you're going to see more and more of those technologies being similar across the landscape.

Joel: This will happen in, and you see it happening. The divide between marketing, recruiting is narrowing?

Thom Kenney: Very much so. The number of companies that we're talking to today, whether they're customers or potential customers, the number of times we're seeing someone from the marketing team involved in the process of selection is increasing because the marketing folks are starting to understand if we crap the bed in our employment brand, it's going to hurt our sales. It's a almost a one to one relationship. You want to avoid that, and the marketing guys are going to get killed if all of a sudden you're not getting the numbers and the results from your marketing campaigns because your employment campaign crapped the bed.

Joel: Yeah. Just tell the marketing team how many resumes are in the database that are being farmed, that'll get their attention. So apparently we're out of time or low on time. Peter, do we have time for questions? Peter, Peter? Castilini?

Ryan (audience): I moved back to the United States a year ago and what struck me was there were three big major companies doing me and hope campaigns. Facebook, Uber and Wells Fargo. They were all doing these big kind of, we've screwed up. Wells Fargo was-

Abby Cheesman: That's right.

Ryan (audience): I don't know as an employment brand and you can control any of that. You are still beholden to that. How do you work in an environment as talent acquisitions, where some of that stuff is outside of your control. I would think that part of the goal with those three campaigns wasn't employment brands.

Joel: I know for a while in the Valley, Facebook was having some recruitment challenges because of that same issue as well as the privacy stuff and other things.

Abby Cheesman: So I think one solution is talking to people who stayed with those companies through those hard times and hearing their story of why did you stay? And I think what you'll find is people are excited by those challenges and there are reasons that maybe are overlooked and all the negativity that people are staying and highlight those stories because they exist. Not everybody left Facebook, right? Not everybody left Wells Fargo. And so I think just simplicity of telling employee stories and elevating those to be important voices is a place to start.

Jason Jones: So Draft Kings and Fan Duel are going to emerge because of government regulations and it didn't work out. And so it was known as time as like a failed merger. Your employees who didn't know if they were going to have jobs. And so this isn't the same degree, but we're trying to unlock their, those employee stories. Like you've gone through the muck, you've gone through the crap, why are you still here and how can we leverage that story to attract people where it's going to get tough, but we want to attract people who aren't going to just leave at the sight of bad PR or bad news.

Joel: Yeah. I mean, you had your own challenge with, I don't know if it's Draft Kings or Fanduel of employees recognizing trends in betting and doing their own betting. So you've kind of had a little bit of that at your company. You might not have been there at the time.

Jason Jones: I wasn't. Yeah. So we had someone who, honestly as you're writing the rules to the game as it's going, we had someone who played on a competitor's site. He didn't know because there was nothing in place to say that he couldn't. And then they got out and there's a media circus and then you're kind of, "Okay, here's what we can do, here's what we can't do." And so, we're always kind of playing catch up as we go. And it does lend to some PR nightmare and it affects recruiting. It affects your employer or consumer brands

Joel: Awesome.

Jason Jones: Thank you, Chad and Cheese.

Chad: Thanks, guys.

Ema: Hi, I'm Ema. Thanks for listening to my dad, The Chad, and his buddy, Cheese. This has been The Chad and Cheese Podcast. Chews podcast. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss a single show. Be sure to check out our sponsors because their money goes to my college fund. For more visit chadcheese.com

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